My Bank Rant

A long time ago in another universe I worked in a bank. It was a small town bank with half a dozen offices, and my grandfather had helped to start it with some local businesspeople in the 1920s.
I only spent two years at that job, but I learned some lessons I’ll never forget.
The biggest one was: Treat your customers like friends. Everybody from the president down to the tellers at that bank knew their customers like they were part of the family. The branch manager knew if the gas station on the corner was out of Pepsi in its vending machines. They knew whether the plumbing supply store was meeting its payroll. What the local real estate market was like. Who was going to expand their business. What type of cars were selling well at the car dealer’s lot. The owners of businesses would come in and sit down at the manager’s desk and chat with him all day long. The tellers would gossip with every customer, and they often knew things that weren’t in the local newspaper. The loan officers in the main office would go golfing with their business customers, or take them out to lunch, and they always remembered a birthday or an important event in some customer’s life.
I was thinking about that recently when I went to my local bank, which has just been taken over by Wells Fargo, because I ran out of checks and needed some temporary checks to tide me over till I my new order came in.
“Sorry, Mr. McDonnell,” the teller said. “There’s now a charge for temporary checks.”
I was flabbergasted. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “There was never a charge for temporary checks.”
“Sorry, it’s a new policy,” she said, without the slightest note of apology in her voice.
That’s not the only new policy, either. I found to my dismay that if I temporarily overdraw my checking account, and Wells Fargo has to cover the overdraft with money from my money market account, they hit me with a fee for that. My previous bank, Wachovia, would do that little transaction for free.
Banks everywhere are tacking on more fees. Those ATM fees that were a minor inconvenience when banks started charging them a few years ago are rising steadily, till it’s now $3 and above for me to use an ATM machine that is not in my bank’s network.
At this rate I’m expecting the day when I’ll have to pay a fee just to walk into one of the bank’s branches. They’ll have a toll collector at the door, or maybe just a machine where you have to swipe a card to get in.
There were none of these fees when I worked in banking. In fact, when I was an assistant branch manager one of my jobs was to settle the checking accounts of old ladies who would come in all flustered because they bounced a check or two, and they’d dump a pile of bank statements on my desk and say, “Can you please help me, young man? I just don’t know how I got in this mess.” It would sometimes take me hours before I could sort out the problem, but we never charged a nickel for it. Imagine a bank doing that today.
We had customers back then who still had their first savings account book, and some of them dated back to the 1920s. They stayed loyal to us because we treated them with kindness, we remembered their names and took an interest in their lives, and we didn’t try to nickel and dime them with fees for every little transaction we performed for them.
I know the world has changed, but it hasn’t changed that much that people don’t care how you treat them when they do business with you. I’m sure Wells Fargo can give me lots of reasons why it’s essential for them to charge fees for things that banks used to do for free, and if the market will bear it then they’re welcome to do it.
But I’m also welcome to take my business elsewhere. I know I won’t find a bank anymore like that small town bank I used to work at, but maybe there’s one that will be just a little more concerned, a little more personal, and a little less prone to stick its hands in my wallet.

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